Jim Groom Delivers Keynote at University of North Florida

On Oct. 1, Jim Groom delivered the keynote address “ds106: This Course Could be Your Life” as part of the inaugural Academic Technology Innovation Symposium at the University of North Florida. The presentation frames how all too often technology becomes a tool fetish or a solution to a problem,yet neither of these approaches is particularly meaningful when it comes to creating a learning community. Using the example of the digital storytelling community/course at UMW (http://ds106.us), this presentation demonstrated how a 25 person course at a small liberal arts college in Virginia became a global learning community. The power of teaching and learning online is not about the shiny object or the solution-minded endgame, but rather the possibility to transcend them both through human interaction on a scale hitherto unimaginable. This is a point that is tied back to initiatives like Domain of One’s Own that attempts to establish the fact that the only thing that truly scales on the web when it comes to social interactions is an individual’s seamless participation within this online ecosystem.